Sunday, March 26, 2006

UnidDate/Time: 3/26/06 Time 21:17:54 local timeMy location : 1.4341 N, 103.7957+8 UTSingaporeThis flasher left trail in marked 1,2,3,4,5. For 2,3,5 a series of 2-3 quick flashes. See this link for individual flash timing.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Reprocesed Digi8 Dv tape recording through UFOCaptureV2. Saw Mstar3 CentRk or 99023B on screen with a couple of bright flashes ( marked as 1 ,2 3) in first image. As I re-positioned the lens I missed small portion of the trail. See 2nd image ( Use lambda Vel as reference point to relate the two images). For ID I ran in SkyMap using bulk tle from space-track but yielded nothing then I switched to Mike's Classfd.tle and ID it . As usual please CLICK the image(s) to see larger version(s).

Saturday, March 11, 2006

A few video frames of the fireball... and a composite of these video frames below.

3:52 AM March 11 Saturday : As if the meteors wanted to have a say ( after my March 10 posting of a bright iridium flare see image in another post below), x1 bright meteor appeared in Lupus. The peak-hold image resembled a ' fountain-pen' . Video and a composite from just a few frame.

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Grand daddy of all flares - A -7 magnitude flare from Iridium # 52 just before 8pm. A helicopter created a wavy horizonal streak at top of frame. Click the image for a closer look. Follow this link to watch the video ( 2Mb)

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

I took a brief break away from the screen and when I returned, the screen registered a bright trail. A single frame revealed a 'fig'-shaped meteor. It was much brighter than the Sirius, est to be - 2 mag or less.

I was watching the PC screen when suddenly the flared happened. I quickly hit the record key. The flare looked very much like iridium flare. Using Skymap object was IDed - Transat or 77-106A. Follow this link to watch the video.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

I have the object matching molniya 3-43 (92-085A) but the period does not match the 4.4 sec reported. Instead I saw 2.3596 ( 58.99/25). CLICK image for larger view. After I submitted the flash timings ( obtained from frame-by-frame inspection of brightest spots of all flashes in the raw DV AVI) to Bjorn , he came back with the period of 4.702 ( see the correspondance and plots from him).

** Mar 06 update (Thanks to Mr Kurt Jonckheere , according to him I was seeing secondary flashes ie 1/2 period timing) => 2x2.3596 or 4.719.

** Mar 12 *Update "Bj" wrote: I plotted your flash measurements, and found them to be very accurate. The spread is +-0.04 s, of which at least +-0.03 s is due to timing resolution and/or image frequency/exposure time. Using 4.702 s period, it is obvious that the first and last flash is part of a main sequence, of which only flash #4 is missing. The secondary maxima lack the last five flashes. (Graph 92-85A.gif sent to yK ) See chart belowPlotting 2.351 s period you can see that the secondary maxima are about .04 s after the mid-period, getting slightly closer by the end. (92-85A2.gif ) The 4.4 s you refer to (old observation?) is very reasonable, assuming it also used the full period, or the secondaries couldn't be seen.